What should we consider for next year's Winter Bash?

Question

At this point, I am relatively confident that Winter Bash will become an annual event. The event is oodles of fun for our communities, and almost everything we do as employees in putting the event together is done with an eye toward repeatability and automation.

With that in mind, I see a lot of feature requests come through on MSO and child metas that are great ideas, but simply not possible (or not worthwhile) to implement for this year's event. The same happens with minor bugs that give Winter Bash a few rough edges without disrupting functionality - they often get left behind on the "eh, maybe next year, if there's time" list.

Reader, this is that list.

What tweaks and feature requests have come up this year that we should keep in mind for next year?

Answer 1

I was trying to see which hats I earned last year, but couldn't. Please add the ability to see my hats from prior years.

Answer 2

A brief description of why you earned a secret hat. You don't have to give the exact formula, but perhaps a clever clue as to why you might have honored me with, say Chuck Yeager.

Indeed, clever descriptions would make all of the secret hats more interesting.

Answer 3

• Smarter criteria for any hats connected to flagging. Maybe first to flag or something connected to helping resolve flags or both. Dozens of users piling on a handful of posts doesn't really help anything.

• A Pizza Hat

  

Answer 4

Display when each awarded hat was earned.
Eg:

You earned this hat on <site> at <timestamp>

For interest, but also to make it possible/easier to figure out how secret hats can be won

Answer 5

There was a question asked here recently:

What are the fantasy secret hats you'd wish to get?

It would be neat to see some of those community-created hat ideas included next year.

Answer 6

I think you guys need a more interesting leaderboard. There are a lot of people who are tied for a bunch of different ranks. Considering there's only around 50 (?) hats, it's rather hard to rank users just by number of hats. Maybe you guys could come up with some more creative way to rank the users to break all the ties?

Some factors:

• Time the user received each hat.
• Number of sites a user has each hat (for the global leaderboard).

Answer 7

Cross-site hats

Award hats for participation across the network, e.g.:

"Ask a question with at least +2 score on five different Stack Exchange sites."

I know, the obvious question is "which site would you earn the hat on?" I'd suggest all of them (that you did something to earn it on, that is).

Answer 8

DISCLAIMER: These are my suggestions and my dreamy dreams. The fact that they're posted by an SE employee doesn't mean they will definitely get implemented for next year.

• Wear-only mode. This is a mode that would allow users to wear their hats on a given site without earning them on that site. This would be useful for Area 51 and for private betas.
• Changing the size and angle of a hat. This year we added the ability to reposition the hats on your avatar. Perhaps next year we can add some scale and angle capabilities.

Answer 9

Rotate the hat.

We can position the hat on the avatar. How hard would it be to add angle/rotation to the positioning, so I can wear my Santa hat on a rakish angle?

There will be those who want to wear their Chuck Yeagar upside down, because the man flew like that quite a bit.

Answer 10

The one I would really like to see, and asked for both years, was for one site-specific hat to be built in to Winterbash for each site.

For example on Security.SE we would really want a Black Hat, like this one specific to the Black Hat security conference (only different so we don't run into copyright problems)

(thanks to Zuly Gonzales for the pic)

What hat do you think would work on your favourite SE site? Would English have a Mortarboard? And what about DIY?

Answer 11

In the review queue, there's a thing that pops out similar to the expanded usercards, but it's not quite one of them. Avatars on it have No Hats. And that's terrible:

If this awesome, hat-filled celebration is going to become a regular thing, then these expanding card thingys _{(and anywhere else where avatars currently appear hatless)} should have hats added to them.

Answer 12

I'd like a way (other than inspecting them one at a time) to see which hats I received on a particular site. The combined list is nice, and I can see which site(s) I earned any given hat on by selecting it, but I'd like to do the reverse too -- choose a site and see the hats that came from there somehow. That would make it easier to select locally-earned hats to wear.

If per-site customization is too hard (I understand that this is a side project, not core functionality), the underlying request could also be addressed by showing the site icons under each hat in the list.

Answer 13

The ability to trade hats.

This is supposed to be "fun" and "not permanent" anyway, right? So, since it's all going to evaporate into an explosion of 1's and 0's just after New Year's, why can't I give my hat to someone, or trade my hat for theirs? That would be way cool to do, and you might accidentally make a new friend along the way.

Answer 14

Include a wizard's hat, and make it for something I am likely to achieve. <|:D

Answer 15

Let everyone choose one hat to carry on to the next year. Or make sure there will always be at least one cat hat out there!

Answer 16

Wear the hat minus the avatar.

So we can display just the hat. Those of us with those generated avatars (and who don't want to upload a photo) who select this option will simply have the hat shown in place of the avatar.

Answer 17

Next year should have tablet/mobile support for hats, especially with respect to repositioning the hat on your avatar.

Balpha answered over here that he wanted to do that this year but ran out of time; let's make time next year!

Answer 18

I was excited for Winter Bash this year, and it started off pretty fun. However, it became apparent within a few days that some fellow English Language & Usage users (including moderators) weren't exactly playing fairly. I think this is obvious to everyone by now but if not just take a look at https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/ and you'll immediately see 2 posts solely for gaming the meta-specific hats. There's also been examples of bounty-trading, deliberately creating questions to award Marauder hats, coordinating votes in chat, and maybe other things I'm not aware of.

To put it frankly, this made me really quickly not enjoy Winter Bash 2013 much at all, and I've come close to clicking "I hate hats". I thought this was supposed to be about helping out the sites we enjoy, but they've basically taken that out of the equation entirely. Most of what's going on there won't help the site in the long run, and some of it might even damage the site (if only slightly). Now, when I look at the leaderboards, I can't tell who is serious and who is cheating, and I've basically lost all motivation to try to get any more hats. It seems to me now that the way to get the most hats involves harming the site in some of the above ways, which is not something I'm going to do.

It would be good if stricter policing was enforced against cheaters. Maybe none of these people deserve suspensions for what they did, but at least the hats they unfairly got should be taken away. It would be hard to enforce all the rules network-wide, but at least the very blatant cases should be penalized. That would make it more fun for those of us who want to get hats fairly.

Along the same lines, hats like "Oh the Horror" were probably a bad idea to start with. Meta guru badges are normally basically impossible anywhere other than here. Few meta sites other than this one even have 40 regular voters. In my opinion hats should be equally obtainable on all sites, or at least as close to that as possible. I suspect that these sorts of practically impossible goals are a lot of what is causing people to cheat. Some people would cheat anyway, but if the hat required an answer with 15 upvotes rather than 40 I think most would try to get it fairly (and maybe moderators would be more willing to punish cheaters). If you want to make a hat like "Oh the Horror" that's effectively specific to one site, go all-out and make it actually specific to that site. Putting more thought into what sort of beneficial effect the hat is supposed to have on the site and making sure it has the desired effect even for smaller communities would really make a big difference in my opinion.

Answer 19

I would like to see the leaderboards retained. You cannot see what the leaderboard was from 2012 now, it would be nice to be able to see the 2013 leaderboard next year.

I also like the idea of being able to see which hats we earned in the previous year somewhere.

Being able to position your hat manually was pretty sweet, good job balpha! I hope that stays.

Perhaps there could also be another modifier? Like a badge modifier where if you earn the modifier then everyone's gold badges look like cookies, or silver badges look like snowflakes, etc. (or Star Wars emblems like SciFi has /jelly).

Winter Bash is a lot of fun :)

Answer 20

Hats on flair, either wear the hat or have a count of hats, or both.

Answer 21

This year added the option to reposition hats. Next year they should be resizable.

I noticed that quite a few people have hats too large for their heads, including me.

Answer 22

I wonder if this time of year is the best time for the hat rush. Yeah, I know it's the festive season, a time of joy etc. etc. but wouldn't it be suited to lighten up the real dark winter days, when there's no fun otherwise. Say, February. Then people would have something to look forward to, to offset the gray, dull, dreary days of winter.

Doing it during Christmas is fun of course, but it may interfere with real life.

"Hey, are you helping to decorate the tree or what?"
"Yeah yeah, just a sec! Only one more upvote!"

Answer 23

For these periodic, but short events, Winterbash, April Fool's, consider relaxing the number of days within which one can change one's profile name.

This would only be pertinent were someone to have changed their profile name for fun, without realising that is would not be possible to return it to the status quo prior to 22 January 2014.

I admit to having done this myself. I would like to look forward to short periods of fun at appropriate times in the future, without having to wait until 30 days later to return to normal.

Answer 24

A closet hat!

A secret hat where the winner of the hat gets to wear a hat they won in a previous year. criteria should probably involve an old post or a tag with few questions (or both).

Answer 25

Vigorously delete unofficial answers and comments that give out spoilers on how to receive secret hats.

Onholdificate questions which ask for instructions.

I know hats are fun, but secret hats are secret. Secrets should stay secret. Sorry.

Answer 26

A Royal Hat

Full discussion

Answer 27

Remove any "mod only" hats.

I want to be able to get them all!

Answer 28

I need a new feature that allows us to overlay an equation on the hat. So MathJax support is really needed here.

Answer 29

A gallery of your avatar wearing all of your hats would be a great addition. That way, you can see what each hat would look like before choosing one.

And, at the end of the bash, when you take your screenshots, it also lets you have a really nice little family portrait gallery and an easy way to "save" them for your own amusement.

Answer 30

An export option. From the 2013 FAQ:

What happens after January 3rd?

After January 3rd, the sites go back to normal and all hats disappear. This is meant to be a fun end-of-year celebration, not a permanent addition to the site.

It could be cool to have a button to export the hats window to a png/pdf file, so people would completely "lose" their accomplishments. And yes, I am aware of the printscreen option. But having something built in would be much easier to use and would produce neater results.